6 ms·

> why would I be an innovator in this system For the same reasons people build better lives for themselves in places even less hospitable to their personal aim

by _jal 6y ago

> why would I be an innovator in this system For the same reasons people build better lives for themselves in places even less hospitable to their personal aims. Lack of resources, family, lack of practical freedom... the list goes on. Hell, some people actually are patriotic. But frankly, I do think this matters much less than people are making this out to be. Larger-than-life superhero CEOs are bullshit. I do not believe you needed Musk or Kalanick to get things that look like their companies. US culture just desperately wants to believe in their homemade gods, so you get conversations like this.

nullstyle 6y ago
"But frankly, I do think this matters much less than people are making this out to be. Larger-than-life superhero CEOs are bullshit. I do not believe you needed Musk or Kalanick to get things that look like their companies. US culture just desperately wants to believe in their homemade gods, so you get conversations like this." hear, hear
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> Larger-than-life superhero CEOs are bullshit This is well written. Thank you. If you believe in the exceptional, or believe you are exceptional, America will draw you to it. If you don’t believe in exceptionalism, America looks like it incurs costs for no gain. The Chinese system in contrast looks balanced. I believe in exceptional people. Almost every measure of a variety of skills has long tails. In most cases, those tails are developed through working at a skill and are not the sole product of innate talent. Incentivising that development thus makes a civilisation more capable. But I’m not so wedded to this belief as to claim it the only way. If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech doesn’t make sense: there are no special thoughts which, if extinguished, are unlikely to recur for a long, long time.
- _jal 6y ago
  > If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech doesn’t make sense I think this only holds if you take a deeply communitarian outlook, which is somewhat difficult to mesh with a belief in the value of the exceptional individual. I value freedom of speech for the same reason I value other freedoms, for the boringly baseline and everyone else, as well as for instrumental reasons - briefly, freedom is its own good because humans are wired for it; and suppression of speech leads to broken, damaging government. In any case, small clarification - I do believe that exceptional people in the sense we're discussing exist. But they are far rarer, and the Superhero CEOs we're talking about are not those.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    Replace “doesn’t make sense” with “isn’t competitive.” If exceptionalism is a mirage, freedom of speech incurs a cost on a country for no gain. Ceteris paribus others without that drag will have an advantage.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  In moving from Canada to the USA, this makes sense. In undergrad one economic history prof basically argued America is just a wider bell curve you overly onto the Canadian bell curve. Left side of the distribution you might consider immigrating from USA to Canada because of the wider social net, very far right side of the bell curve you might do the opposite since the ability to generate and keep economic rewards is much higher in America. Obviously a simplified argument but it sort of makes sense. If you look at Mary Meekers appendix, a good chunk of founder CEOs are foreign or second generation foreign born.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- barumi 6y ago
  > If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech doesn’t make sense: there are no special thoughts which, if extinguished, are unlikely to recur for a long, long time. This comment makes no sense at all. The threat which freedom of speech is designed to protect us from is not attacks on exceptionalism, but oppression and control by the hands of a dictatorship. It matters nothing if you feel you're exceptional or you just happen to disagree with anyone in power over any subject, be it critical or irrelevant. What matters is that no one should have the right to deny you the ability to freely express your ideas, because that would represent control over all aspects of your life and existence.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    Pardon me, I was unclear in my wording. Replace “doesn’t make sense” with “isn’t competitive.” If exceptionalism is a mirage, freedom of speech incurs a cost on a country for no gain. Ceteris paribus others without that drag will have an advantage.
    - barumi 6y ago
      > Replace “doesn’t make sense” with “isn’t competitive.” Is your correction supposed to be an improvement? I mean, the statement "If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech isn't competitive" makes even less sense. It makes no sense at all to talk about freedom of speech incurring a cost. There is absolutely zero cost in not persecuting anyone for having a different opinion.
      - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
        > There is absolutely zero cost in not persecuting anyone for having a different opinion Of course there is. If anti-vax and anti-mask advocates could be silenced by the state, public health would improve in the short term. Freedom of speech is effortful to maintain. It takes effort and self control for a society to tolerate opposing views within itself. Forgetting this risks the freedom itself.
- sfifs 6y ago
  > If you believe in the exceptional, or believe you are exceptional, America will draw you to it. Right until the moment we saw how America (society and government) handles pandemics and school shootings. Even a decade ago, what you said would have been true but now in the medium term, I'll pass :-) It's a pity.. such an incredibly beautiful country.
- mola 6y ago
  Freedom of speech is not utilitarian. It's thought of as a right. The idea that freedom and free speech are important because they make certain processes more efficient is entirely missing the point of the humanist revolution. Freedom is innately good, for its own sake.
cellis 6y ago
You're wrong. Look no further than at the Soviet Union and Communist China for examples. While Microsoft was being built in the US in the late 80's...what were Russian and Chinese innovators building? The Russian Bill Gateses were plotting to steal factories and oil wells and nickel mines, the Chinese were plotting to get political posts. Those are the extreme examples. How about Europe? In the late 80's and early 90's almost no major innovative companies came from Europe. What explains that?
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  Having lived a few short years in a communist country it’s hard to describe just how corrosive the mentality is. Institutions matter so so so much. America is unbelievably blessed. This is terrible to say, but you have to (my belief) basically wait for that older generation to die and the newer one to mature to undo the effects of that regime. There is a crazy game theory degradation when you lose trust and corruption rises. It’s hard to convey just how insidious and broken such a society is. And this is communism, not socialism which appears to be fine based on Western European experience. One of Mitt Romney’s coworkers at Bain wrote a book a few years ago and France is actually more productive than America and has grown faster, as measured on GDP dollars per capita per hour. Aka they are more productive. Yet USA works like 2100 hours per year and France is closer to 1700, which is why you have the GDP per capita differential. End of the day, institutions matter.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    Sounds like France is getting the better end of the bargain.
    - ArnoVW 6y ago
      And that does not even take into account rate of endebtment. Nor the fact that the US has several historical advantages, like the role of the dollar, or the fact that they emerged out of WW II with 'only' 250k dead and their economy and infrastructures intact.
- deleted 6y ago
texasbigdata 6y ago
Probably less relevant in the musk case where he originally financed the organization and later took the ceo role. The “I believe and/or will fund this” + CEO combines and confounds the effects. Sure maybe multiple people could have taken Uber from $100M of revenue to whatever the current day performance is, but at the end of the day it was him and the other two dudes (from the book) that quit their jobs and did it (and raised money from an Internet forum, etc). This is the whole man in the arena argument by Teddy Rosevelt. Easy to say from far, but probably harder to do; like that old saying that work gets harder the closer you get to actually doing it. Respectfully.
- tomnipotent 6y ago
  > originally financed the organization and later took the ceo role Regardless of him being a founder or a usurper, I don't think Tesla or SpaceX would have been the businesses they became without Musk. He was the primary driving force behind the initiatives that led to their current day success. It reminds me of the "but you didn't" argument, said in response to someone looking at a painting or piece of art and saying "I could have done that". Maybe many people could have done for Tesla what Musk has done, but they didn't.
  - texasbigdata 6y ago
    :) Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” (1910)
mrkstu 6y ago
So show me SpaceX somewhere other than the US. SpaceX exists solely because of Musk and the culture in the US that encourages his kind of risk taking. It literally would/could not occur anywhere else and even now, with the successful example it is setting, other countries are having an extremely hard time replicating it.
- ygtx 6y ago
  the soviets had a pretty successful space program back in the day...
  - mrkstu 6y ago
    They threw the whole resources of a nation state at it to do it as well, vs the bootstrapping of one guy with about a hundred million bucks. It takes the right guy and the right environment to make that kind of magic happen.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      They really didn't. The Soviet space program operated with around a third of the US Space program (about one 200th of the USSR economy in 1970), or the equivalent of, give or take, 30 billion 2020 US dollars, or around 10 times the budget of SpaceX, notwithstanding technological price deflation. With 1970s tech and only ten times the budget, the Soviet space program certainly innovated a lot more than SpaceX did, in all fields, from computer science to basic physics, to metallurgy, to jet engines, and built more ambitious missions.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  The impact and innovation of SpaceX is much lesser than that of, for example, NASA or the Soviet space program. Eventually, its capabilities too will be matched, and exceeded, probably by at least one public program.

by _jal 6y ago

nullstyle 6y ago

"But frankly, I do think this matters much less than people are making this out to be. Larger-than-life superhero CEOs are bullshit. I do not believe you needed Musk or Kalanick to get things that look like their companies. US culture just desperately wants to believe in their homemade gods, so you get conversations like this." hear, hear

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> Larger-than-life superhero CEOs are bullshit This is well written. Thank you. If you believe in the exceptional, or believe you are exceptional, America will draw you to it. If you don’t believe in exceptionalism, America looks like it incurs costs for no gain. The Chinese system in contrast looks balanced. I believe in exceptional people. Almost every measure of a variety of skills has long tails. In most cases, those tails are developed through working at a skill and are not the sole product of innate talent. Incentivising that development thus makes a civilisation more capable. But I’m not so wedded to this belief as to claim it the only way. If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech doesn’t make sense: there are no special thoughts which, if extinguished, are unlikely to recur for a long, long time.

_jal 6y ago
> If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech doesn’t make sense I think this only holds if you take a deeply communitarian outlook, which is somewhat difficult to mesh with a belief in the value of the exceptional individual. I value freedom of speech for the same reason I value other freedoms, for the boringly baseline and everyone else, as well as for instrumental reasons - briefly, freedom is its own good because humans are wired for it; and suppression of speech leads to broken, damaging government. In any case, small clarification - I do believe that exceptional people in the sense we're discussing exist. But they are far rarer, and the Superhero CEOs we're talking about are not those.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  Replace “doesn’t make sense” with “isn’t competitive.” If exceptionalism is a mirage, freedom of speech incurs a cost on a country for no gain. Ceteris paribus others without that drag will have an advantage.
texasbigdata 6y ago
In moving from Canada to the USA, this makes sense. In undergrad one economic history prof basically argued America is just a wider bell curve you overly onto the Canadian bell curve. Left side of the distribution you might consider immigrating from USA to Canada because of the wider social net, very far right side of the bell curve you might do the opposite since the ability to generate and keep economic rewards is much higher in America. Obviously a simplified argument but it sort of makes sense. If you look at Mary Meekers appendix, a good chunk of founder CEOs are foreign or second generation foreign born.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
barumi 6y ago
> If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech doesn’t make sense: there are no special thoughts which, if extinguished, are unlikely to recur for a long, long time. This comment makes no sense at all. The threat which freedom of speech is designed to protect us from is not attacks on exceptionalism, but oppression and control by the hands of a dictatorship. It matters nothing if you feel you're exceptional or you just happen to disagree with anyone in power over any subject, be it critical or irrelevant. What matters is that no one should have the right to deny you the ability to freely express your ideas, because that would represent control over all aspects of your life and existence.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  Pardon me, I was unclear in my wording. Replace “doesn’t make sense” with “isn’t competitive.” If exceptionalism is a mirage, freedom of speech incurs a cost on a country for no gain. Ceteris paribus others without that drag will have an advantage.
  - barumi 6y ago
    > Replace “doesn’t make sense” with “isn’t competitive.” Is your correction supposed to be an improvement? I mean, the statement "If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech isn't competitive" makes even less sense. It makes no sense at all to talk about freedom of speech incurring a cost. There is absolutely zero cost in not persecuting anyone for having a different opinion.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > There is absolutely zero cost in not persecuting anyone for having a different opinion Of course there is. If anti-vax and anti-mask advocates could be silenced by the state, public health would improve in the short term. Freedom of speech is effortful to maintain. It takes effort and self control for a society to tolerate opposing views within itself. Forgetting this risks the freedom itself.
sfifs 6y ago
> If you believe in the exceptional, or believe you are exceptional, America will draw you to it. Right until the moment we saw how America (society and government) handles pandemics and school shootings. Even a decade ago, what you said would have been true but now in the medium term, I'll pass :-) It's a pity.. such an incredibly beautiful country.
mola 6y ago
Freedom of speech is not utilitarian. It's thought of as a right. The idea that freedom and free speech are important because they make certain processes more efficient is entirely missing the point of the humanist revolution. Freedom is innately good, for its own sake.

cellis 6y ago

You're wrong. Look no further than at the Soviet Union and Communist China for examples. While Microsoft was being built in the US in the late 80's...what were Russian and Chinese innovators building? The Russian Bill Gateses were plotting to steal factories and oil wells and nickel mines, the Chinese were plotting to get political posts. Those are the extreme examples. How about Europe? In the late 80's and early 90's almost no major innovative companies came from Europe. What explains that?

texasbigdata 6y ago
Having lived a few short years in a communist country it’s hard to describe just how corrosive the mentality is. Institutions matter so so so much. America is unbelievably blessed. This is terrible to say, but you have to (my belief) basically wait for that older generation to die and the newer one to mature to undo the effects of that regime. There is a crazy game theory degradation when you lose trust and corruption rises. It’s hard to convey just how insidious and broken such a society is. And this is communism, not socialism which appears to be fine based on Western European experience. One of Mitt Romney’s coworkers at Bain wrote a book a few years ago and France is actually more productive than America and has grown faster, as measured on GDP dollars per capita per hour. Aka they are more productive. Yet USA works like 2100 hours per year and France is closer to 1700, which is why you have the GDP per capita differential. End of the day, institutions matter.
- triceratops 6y ago
  Sounds like France is getting the better end of the bargain.
  - ArnoVW 6y ago
    And that does not even take into account rate of endebtment. Nor the fact that the US has several historical advantages, like the role of the dollar, or the fact that they emerged out of WW II with 'only' 250k dead and their economy and infrastructures intact.
deleted 6y ago

texasbigdata 6y ago

Probably less relevant in the musk case where he originally financed the organization and later took the ceo role. The “I believe and/or will fund this” + CEO combines and confounds the effects. Sure maybe multiple people could have taken Uber from $100M of revenue to whatever the current day performance is, but at the end of the day it was him and the other two dudes (from the book) that quit their jobs and did it (and raised money from an Internet forum, etc). This is the whole man in the arena argument by Teddy Rosevelt. Easy to say from far, but probably harder to do; like that old saying that work gets harder the closer you get to actually doing it. Respectfully.

tomnipotent 6y ago
> originally financed the organization and later took the ceo role Regardless of him being a founder or a usurper, I don't think Tesla or SpaceX would have been the businesses they became without Musk. He was the primary driving force behind the initiatives that led to their current day success. It reminds me of the "but you didn't" argument, said in response to someone looking at a painting or piece of art and saying "I could have done that". Maybe many people could have done for Tesla what Musk has done, but they didn't.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  :) Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” (1910)

mrkstu 6y ago

So show me SpaceX somewhere other than the US. SpaceX exists solely because of Musk and the culture in the US that encourages his kind of risk taking. It literally would/could not occur anywhere else and even now, with the successful example it is setting, other countries are having an extremely hard time replicating it.

ygtx 6y ago
the soviets had a pretty successful space program back in the day...
- mrkstu 6y ago
  They threw the whole resources of a nation state at it to do it as well, vs the bootstrapping of one guy with about a hundred million bucks. It takes the right guy and the right environment to make that kind of magic happen.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    They really didn't. The Soviet space program operated with around a third of the US Space program (about one 200th of the USSR economy in 1970), or the equivalent of, give or take, 30 billion 2020 US dollars, or around 10 times the budget of SpaceX, notwithstanding technological price deflation. With 1970s tech and only ten times the budget, the Soviet space program certainly innovated a lot more than SpaceX did, in all fields, from computer science to basic physics, to metallurgy, to jet engines, and built more ambitious missions.
sudosysgen 6y ago
The impact and innovation of SpaceX is much lesser than that of, for example, NASA or the Soviet space program. Eventually, its capabilities too will be matched, and exceeded, probably by at least one public program.